Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann. This morning, Trump was posting AI-generated images of laser-blasting battleships at 5:41 a.m. after sleeping for approximately five hours. The trade court just ruled his replacement tariffs were also illegal, hours after he gave Europe a July 4 deadline to accept his trade deal or face higher ones. A Democrat is running a genuinely competitive race for governor of Iowa, and Republicans in the legislature are already moving to limit the next governor’s powers in case he wins. And on Iran, the emerging deal looks nothing like what Trump promised: no unconditional surrender, no regime change, no end to proxy groups, just a temporary nuclear freeze in exchange for lifting the sanctions he imposed. Corporate media is running cover for all of it. The FCC chair has made sure they know the cost. And the Ellisons keep buying. Let’s get into it.
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Trump Is Posting Laser Battleship Memes at 5 A.M. and His Own Chief of Staff Is Complaining About It
At 5:41 Friday morning, Trump began a Truth Social posting spree that included AI-generated images of a U.S. battleship blasting an Iranian fighter jet with the caption “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!” He also shared a graphic comparing the length of his Iran war to Vietnam, Afghanistan, and World War II, apparently to argue that two months is not that long. He promoted a UFC event at the White House. He compared oil prices under his presidency to Biden’s.
His last post before the morning blitz had gone up at 12:16 a.m. That is a five-hour-and-25-minute gap.
This is not a new pattern. The Daily Beast previously documented that in the entire month of April, there were only five days on which Trump could have gotten a full night’s sleep based on his Truth Social timestamps. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles addressed the situation publicly Thursday night at the Independent Women’s Gala. “I go to sleep early, and I actually do very much need sleep,” she told the audience. She explained that she and deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino divide overnight duty because of the president’s schedule. “We divide it. I get the early calls, and Dan gets the late calls. That’s the way we’ve navigated over a couple of years, making sure we all get enough sleep, even if the president doesn’t.”
Even if the president doesn’t.
The sleep deprivation may explain why Trump has a documented tendency to doze off at public events. The man responsible for an active naval blockade in one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes and ongoing negotiations to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran is operating on approximately five hours of sleep and posting laser battleship content before most Americans have had coffee.
The framers built commander-in-chief authority on the assumption that the person holding it would be capable of sober deliberation, the kind Hamilton described in Federalist 70 as energy in the executive tempered by judgment. What we’ve got instead is a sleep-deprived septuagenarian making nuclear-adjacent decisions between Truth Social posts, and his own chief of staff saying the quiet part out loud about how she navigates around it.
The Trade Court Just Ruled Trump’s Replacement Tariffs Were Also Illegal
In February, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs, ruling he did not have authority to impose them under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Trump replaced them with tariffs under a different legal authority. On Thursday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled those tariffs were also illegal, siding with a toy company and a spice importer who challenged the president’s authority to impose a 10 percent global tariff on most imports under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
The ruling was 2-1. It applies only to the two businesses in the case, not to the 24 states that had also sought an injunction. The administration could still be required to refund tariff revenue collected from those businesses, and the decision sets a precedent that other challengers will almost certainly use.
Hours before the ruling came down, Trump was publicly operating as if his tariffs were still fully in force, giving European allies a deadline of July 4 to accept his trade deal or face tariffs at “much higher levels.”
Trump had spent part of Thursday grumbling about the Supreme Court’s February decision. “We had an unfortunate ruling out of the Supreme Court, but the good news is I’m able to do it a different way,” he said. He described his replacement tariffs as “a little bit more complex” and “better.”
Apparently not, according to the trade court.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to lay and collect duties, and Congress spent the 20th century slowly handing that authority to the executive through statutes like the Trade Act of 1974. The trade court just reminded everyone that even delegated power has limits, and a president who treats global tariffs like a personal pricing menu is going to keep running into the document he swore to uphold.
A Democrat Is Legitimately Threatening to Win the Iowa Governorship — So Republicans Are Already Moving to Limit His Powers
Iowa has had a Republican governor for 15 years. Trump won the state by more than 13 points in 2024. Republicans control the legislature, both Senate seats, and all six congressional seats.
And yet the Cook Political Report moved the governor’s race to “tossup” in April.
Democratic state auditor Rob Sand is running for governor on a message of economic decline, population loss, and a rapidly growing cancer rate in the state. He raised $9.5 million in 2025, outraising all Republican primary opponents combined. More than 1,500 registered Republicans and over 4,000 unaffiliated voters have contributed to his campaign. He is running unopposed on the Democratic side while five Republicans compete in a crowded June 2 primary.
The race is competitive enough that Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature has already moved to limit the governor’s emergency powers in a bill widely understood as preparation for a Sand victory. If a Republican were certain to win, there would be no need to pre-emptively clip the office’s wings.
Sand is running as a pragmatist, using forest green and blaze orange campaign colors that reflect his hunting background and resonate in rural Iowa. His slogan is “Not redder or bluer, but better and truer.” He has avoided campaigning with national Democratic leaders. His argument to voters is not ideological: it is that Iowa ranks among the worst economies in the nation, that college-educated residents are leaving, and that Republican leadership has had 15 years to fix it and has not.
Iowa is not supposed to be a tossup. It is, and the Republican legislature is already rewriting the rules just in case.
This is the same playbook Wisconsin Republicans ran in 2018 against Tony Evers and the one North Carolina Republicans ran in 2016 against Roy Cooper, stripping powers from offices they were about to lose. When a party rewrites the job description rather than accept the voters’ choice, that’s not democracy losing gracefully, that’s democracy being told its outcome doesn’t count.
Trump’s Iran Deal Looks Nothing Like What He Promised
When Trump launched the Iran war on February 28, he made the goals explicit: unconditional surrender, regime change, and an end to Iran’s support for proxy groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. He told the Iranian people directly in his war announcement video to “take over your government” and “seize control of your destiny.”
That was ten weeks ago. Here is what the emerging deal actually looks like.
Sources say the framework under negotiation would freeze Iran’s nuclear program for approximately 10 years and require Tehran to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. In return, the U.S. would lift sanctions, unfreeze billions in Iranian funds, and both sides would reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The deal would trigger a 30-day negotiation period to finalize terms.
There is no unconditional surrender. There is no regime change. There is no mention of proxy groups. The nuclear program would be paused, not ended permanently. Iran would still exist as a functioning state with the same government in place.
When a journalist at a Tuesday briefing asked Pete Hegseth directly what happened to the pledge of unconditional surrender and when the president decided to “capitulate,” Hegseth denied capitulation but offered no explanation for the dramatic shift.
Two months of war. A naval blockade that has pushed gas to $4.30 a gallon. A conflict that has cost more than $25 billion and counting. And the deal on the table is a temporary nuclear freeze in exchange for lifting the sanctions Trump imposed, with the same government still running Iran.
The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to declare war, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was supposed to claw some of that authority back after Vietnam taught us what happens when presidents start wars on their own. Every administration since has worked around it, and now we’ve got a war sold on regime change ending with the same regime in place, the same gap between promise and outcome the country lived through from the Gulf of Tonkin to the WMDs in Iraq, just with shorter memories and higher gas prices.
This Is why Raw America Exists — and Why We Need You
The president is posting laser battleship content before sunrise and threatening Europe with tariffs while courts rule those tariffs illegal. The Iran deal looks nothing like what the war was sold as. And the press corps that is supposed to document the gap between the promise and the reality is being bought, threatened, and handed to people who have made their intentions plain.
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This is Thom Hartmann for Raw America. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Virginia Supreme Court Strikes Down Voter-Approved Redistricting Plan. The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday issued a ruling invalidating the result of April’s redistricting ballot referendum. In the 46-page decision siding with Republican state senator Ryan McDougle, the justices wrote that the new maps that were expected to give Democrats four additional U.S. House seats violated Article XII, Section 1 of the Virginia constitution, which lays out the amendment process. Under the old maps that were in place prior to the referendum, Democrats were still favored in two of the four districts in question.
Inmates Being Punished for Talking About Ghislaine Maxwell. Federal inmates at the Bryan, Texas minimum-security prison camp who are criticizing the soft treatment of Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell are being punished by the prison’s warden, Tanisha Hall. CNN reported that inmates who complained about the convicted child sex trafficker serving a 20-year prison sentence being allowed to serve her time at a facility designed for nonviolent white-collar criminals are being transferred to a harsher facility in Houston. One inmate said that even uttering the word “pedophile” in the warden’s presence led to a transfer. Maxwell was transferred to Bryan after a two-day meeting with then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Pete Hegseth Making Cartoons to Ask for Even More Pentagon Money. As part of his request to Congress for an additional $500 billion in DoD appropriations, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently appeared in a two-minute video in front of a green screen that projected cartoon images of tanks and battleships. Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton countered that the $1.5 trillion Hegseth is asking for could house every homeless veteran, cover every American without health insurance, provide Pell Grants for every prospective college student and build high-speed rail across the country.
Protesters Sue to Stop DHS from Building Database of Americans’ DNA. Four protesters who were arrested outside the Broadview ICE detention facility near Chicago are now filing a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The protesters claim that even though none of them were convicted of a crime, the DHS still collected their DNA and stored it in a database without their consent, giving the federal government information not only about them, but their families. The protesters argued that the Supreme Court ruled that DNA collection can only take place when someone has been arrested with probable cause for a serious offense, confirmed by a judicial officer.
Trump Winds Down By Listening to Ballroom Construction Updates. President Donald Trump apparently has been calling in the site manager overseeing construction of his $400 million ballroom to provide him with updates for more than an hour at a time. The Washington Post reported Thursday that the president — who is a notorious teetotaler — listens to construction updates as a way to wind down. The president razed the historic East Wing of the White House without congressional input and with no required public hearings in order to begin construction on the project. He initially claimed it would be funded through private donations, though Senate Republicans this week inserted more than $1 billion in taxpayer funds into a budget bill specifically for the ballroom.
